Sometimes I feel like I am looking for a pin in a haystack when I am searching the internet for something. It seems like 10 years ago there were blogs everywhere that reviewed books, asking to be sent books, and plenty of them reviewed science fiction. There were also sites where you could submit an article that you wrote yourself about your own book.
Recently I thought I would start publicizing my books and I looked for blogs to submit my books to and looked for real sites that let you post your own articles. After much searching, I couldn't find many bloggers dealing with science fiction or where one could send in a book and get a somewhat immediate response. I couldn't find any websites with a book section that let you submit your own article about science fiction books. I did find my stuff listed on dubious websites that charge for services, or fees, or membership, that offered downloads of my books that can be downloaded for free on smashwords all year round. Some of them looked liked retail outlets in Europe, maybe they are real but I was not inclined to see what I got if I tried to download one of my books.
Smashwords use to be a good distribution point for free diownloads for me, but that all disappeared when google changed their search algorithm to look for original sources instead of rewrites. Smashwords wasn't any near the top of the google search results for many weeks after that. Smashwords finally got back to the first page of google search results along with amazon and google but the audience it delivers to me is not the same audience, nor apparently interested in what I am peddling.
When I read the self help articles on line it seems so easy. I did mail out a bunch of books in the beginning and that resulted in nothing. When Goodreads only had physical giveaways it only seemed to attract people who wanted a free book to resell. Since amazon stepped in, I haven't heard of any good results, and they now say "Entrants required to add the book to their Want to Read list", which looks nice, but doesn't do anything. They also have a premium service for $600 that supposedly insures that people will see the book advertised in prominent places. That's out of my league.
I have been researching niche audiences because in today's world of 8 billion people, there are now hundreds of millions of readers, and even niche audiences have grown to respectable numbers. The problem with the niche audience is that they are either all in one place, which I think is rare, or they are scattered amongst the general reading (best seller, latest style, etc.) population, set up much the same way people view a parade. The people lining the streets is the general reading population, easy to show them what you have. Much farther back in the crowd, very scattered, are niche readers and the niche readers are also in apartments and rooms inside the buildings away from the parade in the street, probably the rooms don't even have windows where they could see the parade. Because they are so far apart, contacting each niche reader cost money.
I am contemplating a large print edition, as the public library has a limited number of large print books. Perhaps the large print book is a smaller arena. The problem is that if I publish my book using the large print book rules, it turns into 3 volumes, which I avoided doing in the original run. I kept it to a single volume, forgoing the first volume is free, the next two volumes are paid for route.
